licentious radio

Thursday, August 29, 2002
[12:11:05 PM]

Sanity from Zeldman, inanity from Microsoft. Spake Zeldman:

"More and more, we find ourselves creating transitional layouts that incorporate simplified table structures; use sophisticated CSS to add the kind of details that used to require nested tables, spacer gifs, and other presentational hacks; and serve a basic style sheet to 4.0 browsers that approximates the display in modern ones."

(Back to J. R.'s comments here...) In fact, tables for page layout -- setting up columns -- are more accessible than using CSS positioning for divs. "Accessibility" software, like humans, have no trouble finding which table cell has the "content" of the page.

Heck I have an aggressively stupid script that works 90+% of the time just by using regular expressions to find the contents of table cells, and then only displaying the contents of the cell with the most text (not counting hrefs).

Zeldman:

"And it's not just 4.0 browsers that make pure CSS layout a pain. We get 50 letters a day from IE6 users complaining that they can't read the full text of A List Apart articles. A bug in IE6 cuts off long text in any floating div. Since 'float' is essential to CSS layout, any site that uses it to format long passages of text will be broken in IE6.

"The bug affects only some percentage of IE6 users. But that's like saying it affects some percentage of the population of China."

J. R.:

Given the wide range of incompatible CSS implementations in browsers, it's quite a trick to pick which features to use. Clearly given the Zeldman's IE bug, you shouldn't use CSS layouts for IE.

A better approach is tables for page layout, prevent Netscape 4 from seeing the stylesheets at all, and use very light text formatting in CSS. Alas, the most interesting CSS features are only available in Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Netscape 6+, etc.).

[11:49:12 AM]
Andrew Orlowski review os x.2 [theregister.co.uk]. It's a fine review, but doesn't get into the key problem with OS X: that it's an aggressively single-tasking gui. That's fine for Apple's target audiences of neophytes and graphic designers, but it leaves programmers, developers, and web-oriented folks in the cold.

Here's the email I sent Andrew:

I wanted to like OS X, but it mostly doesn't work for me.

I use *lots* of windows, and switch between them frequently. Keystroke task switching should be in lifo order, not the order of the icons in the dock. I need every open window to have an icon in the taskbar, so I can get to it in one click, even if the window itself is completely hidden on the desktop. And I like having six desktops, so I can easily switch between projects.

(On five desktops right now I have a total of 28 windows open -- slightly less than normal. The sixth desktop has 93, which isn't that unusual for me.)

The final straw is that an out-of-focus window is mostly not clickable -- I have to click to give it focus, then click again on what I want it to do. At 1600x1200 or 3200x1200, I don't want to think about whether a window has focus. I just want it to do what I tell it to do, when I tell it. Even if the OS could switch focus quickly when I click, that still forces me to think whether to click once or twice.

OS X may be great underneath, but the gui is aggressively single-tasking. That's sensible for their target market: watch a dvd, or play music, or do email, or Quicken, or plug in a digital camera. But I would imagine many people who are accustomed to Linux and Windows will find it too limiting.

After spending months with OS X and two monitors at 3200x1200, I switched to kde/Linux with one monitor at 1280x960, and I'm far more productive. (If only I could sleep the box and easily plug in two monitors....)

I thought your article was very good, by the way, but it seems to me task-switching would be relevant.

J. R.

Andrew wrote back, agreeing that task switching in os x is a big problem. He suggests LiteSwitch and MaxMenus, except that they are temporarily broken by x.2

[11:21:58 AM]
Have you patched Windows today?

Yet another digital certificate flaw [theregister.co.uk]. There's a patch for this one, but MS still hasn't fixed an even more easily exploited hole.

How bad is it? Say you use a Windows computer to do online banking. Digital certificates are the key to safety -- your browser knows it's really talking to the bank because of the certificate. But these Windows flaws let any enterprising bad-guy fake your browser into believing it's talking to your bank. The smart bad-guy will pass the transaction through to the bank, but then follow up with another transaction -- wiring all your money to the same off-shore bank Ken Lay uses.

What if you use Quicken, not a web browser? Same problem, because the operating system manages the certificates.

So the opening quip was really a joke -- you could apply all existing patches to Windows and IE, and a bad-guy could still empty your bank account. The good news is that they can't do this to too many people at once, or the FBI will chase them down. The bad news is that if you "get lucky", life will be very unpleasant, with no money.

MS, noted monopolist power-abuser hasn't fixed this yet. KDE, noted open source project, fixed the problem in a day. I guess that's the difference between putting people with values in charge (KDE) and putting MBAs in charge.